Note-taking and other memory assisting software and online services are used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. By mid-2013, an Evernote memory platform service and software, built by the Evernote Corporation of Redwood City, Calif., counted alone over 60M users and is adding millions of new users each month. Major application stores for Android, iOS, Mac and Windows platforms carry over 600 note-taking software titles aimed at memorizing diverse types of information.
One of the fast growing key trends in digital note-taking and in personal information management (PIM) as a whole is multi-platform content accessibility. This is particularly true for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Thus, according to usage statistics published by Evernote, over 75% of users have been creating and viewing their information on two or more platforms, of which at least one was represented by a mobile device. Analogously, most new users of the Dropbox, Inc.'s distributed storage service arrive from mobile devices.
Note-taking is defined by some sources as the “practice of recording information captured from another source”. With constantly growing multimedia capabilities of mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets and emerging wearable gadgets, information sources captured and memorized in personal databases on mobile devices vs. desktop computers are quite different from each other. An explosive growth of mobile usage has led to significant expansion of data types that can be instantly captured by users and then memorized, as necessary, in their personal databases. External streams of mobile content arrive to a mobile device in multiple ways, such as incoming voice calls and voicemails, photos taken by embedded cameras, messages, notifications, images and other content arriving via messaging, social and online applications and services, user destinations captured by location-aware devices, actions scheduled by software and online sources. Capturing external streams is described in Published U.S. Patent Application No. US20130212463 titled: “SMART DOCUMENT PROCESSING WITH ASSOCIATED ONLINE DATA AND ACTION STREAMS”, filed on Oct. 31, 2012 by Pachikov, et al. and incorporated by reference herein, etc. Smartphones and some categories of wearable devices are also capable of generating, displaying and processing traditional PIM events, such as scheduled meetings from user calendars and emails; therefore, such external events may also be present on mobile devices. Additionally, life logging with wearable computers and video cameras gradually makes its way into a modern lifestyle; in the meantime, smartphones are increasingly used for life logging activities, which may have both personal and social networking components.
Irrespective of sources, capturing methods, and hardware options utilized for obtaining external mobile content, users may like to memorize portions of such content flowing through their mobile devices. They would also like to see such content in the appropriate context, side-by-side with other content and notes taken on different devices.
Notwithstanding growing user capabilities to access multimedia content on their mobile devices, existing software applications and methods for recording different media types are under-developed and limited in scope. Content capturing options are scattered between different sources of mobile content, use disparate storage options and have no mechanisms allowing association of new data with the previously stored information. User capabilities to set up meaningful and customizable recording criteria allowing selective recording of an external content in association with user's previous experiences are not readily available and in many cases such customization is impossible.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide advanced methods and systems for assisted memorizing of external mobile content.